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An Enquiry into the Nature of Liberation : Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha’s Paramokṣanirāsakārikāvṛtti, a commentary on Sadyojyotiḥ's refutation of twenty conceptions of the liberated state (mokṣa).

Author:

For the first time critically edited, translated into English and annotated by Alex Watson, Dominic Goodall, S.L.P. Anjaneya Sarma

Publisher:

Institut Français de Pondichéry / Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient

Year:2013

Pages:

508 p.

Series:

Collection Indologie n°122

Language:

Sanskrit, English

ISBN:

978-81-8470-195-1

Price:

900 Rs (38 €)

Remarks:---

About the book

This book presents a short philosophical treatise in which twenty rival theories of the liberated state (mokṣa) are introduced and countered, and a long, discursive commentary that explores and develops the arguments that the treatise advances or implies. The original treatise comprises fifty-nine Sanskrit verses composed by Sadyojyotiḥ (c. 675–725 AD), the earliest named Śaiva philosopher of the Mantramārga of whom works survive. The commentator, Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha (c. 950–1000 AD), was a Kashmirian whose writings systematised the doctrines of the classical Śaiva Siddhānta, for some centuries the dominant school of tantric Śaivism. Presented here is a first critical edition of these interlinked works and a richly annotated English translation. A lightly annotated introduction lays out clearly the ideas that the edited texts expound. Their study casts light not only on the history of Śaiva thought, but also on a number of religio-philosophical doctrines for which little other testimony survives.

1) Alex Watson is the Sanskrit Preceptor at Harvard University, and author of The Self’s Awareness of Itself. Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha’s Arguments Against the Buddhist Doctrine of No-Self (Vienna, 2006). After a BA in European Philosophy and Psychology (University of Oxford), he switched to Indian Philosophy and Sanskrit, completing an MA (SOAS, University of London), MPhil, DPhil and JRF (University of Oxford). He has held research fellowships at the EFEO (Pondicherry), a JSPS fellowship at Kyushu University, and has taught at the University of Vienna. 2 ) After studies in Oxford and in Hamburg, Dominic Goodall passed several years working in Pondicherry, where he was head of the Pondicherry Centre of the École française d’Extrême-Orient from 2002 to 2011. He has published critical editions of Śaiva works and of classical Sanskrit poetry (most recently, with Csaba Dezső, the eighth-century Kuṭṭanīmata of Dāmodaragupta). He is currently based in Paris, where he gives lectures on Indian and Cambodian Sanskrit literature at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (section des sciences religieuses). 3) After receiving a traditional education under his father and paternal uncle, S.L.P. Anjaneya Sarma took MA and PhD degrees in Sanskrit poetry and grammar from Andhra University in Vishakhapatanam. From 1972 to 1987 he was Assistant Professor at Matrushri Oriental College in Andhra Pradesh and since 1987 he has been working as a Senior Research Fellow at the École française d’Extrême-Orient in Pondicherry. He has penned two monographs in the field of Sanskrit grammar, one dealing with the Guruprasādapariśīlana and the other with commentaries on a sūtra of Pāṇini (Aṣṭādhyāyī 1.3.67), as well as several articles. He participates in traditional Indian scholastic debates (sadas), but also teaches and works with Western students of Sanskrit.